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Lionel Shriver never just writes a book. She takes on the ills of society — putting her finger on the zeitgeist, riffing on the things about our popular culture that create crises and making us look at ourselves in a new way.

In her huge bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin, she delved into the dark soul of the American psyche with the question: how are we, as individuals and as a society, responsible for violence, for creating kids that can shoot up a high school. Peripherally, it takes a look at parenthood, marriage and responsibility.

Now, in Big Brother, she takes a look at another great issue of our time: obesity — the hows and whys of it, how we, as a society, view food and weight. Wound up in it all is an examination of family relationships, marriage and intimacy.

Pandora Halfdanarson is in her early 40s, an entrepreneur whose ridiculously Baby Monotonous dolls have made her unexpectedly rich: they’re custom-made, pull-string dolls programmed to say all the frustrating things your loved ones repeat every day, chosen by you: “I owe it to myself to have a few nice things” is what the habitual spender in your life, for instance, might say.

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Expensive, passive-aggressive presents for your nearest and dearest.

Pandora is also married to controlling fitness freak, Fletcher, stepmother to Cody and Tanner — and little sister to Edison, the Big Brother of the title.

Edison Appaloosa, her jazz-playing, cool cat, utterly broke older sibling, has gained more than 200 pounds in a short few years and has come to visit.

When she realizes he’s not going to leave — and hoping to help give him his life back — Pandora decides to temporarily leave her husband, move into an apartment with Edison and create a diet boot camp: she’ll help him lose 223 pounds while she, herself, tries to lose 30 or so.

And when he does — perhaps she’ll catch a glimpse of the brother she used to idolize, the proverbial and, well, cliché, thin person in a fat man’s body.

This sets the stage for the broader scope of this story: it’s not only about dysfunctional relationships with food, but also within families and how these relationships inevitably collide.

Shriver’s writing is quite fun — but can seem a little rehearsed at times. Pandora and Edison’s father had been a 1970s TV dad — star of Joint Custody when they were growing up. There’s a great set piece where Shriver points out that much of the TV we grew up with in the ’70s was populated by widowers (no messy divorces in TV land), with the occasional widow thrown in for good measure. My Three Sons. The Brady Bunch. The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. Family Affair.

When she tackles our societal prejudice against obesity head on, it too sounds slightly rehearsed. When called “fat” by Fletcher, Edison points out: “I know I’m fat . . . It’s not a description but a verdict. Like I’m an abomination, the source of all evil and corruption in the universe. I eat too much, but I ain’t murdered anybody.”

But it’s not really about the weight — it’s a general comment on our society’s relationship with food: “More concept than substance, food is the idea of satisfaction, far more powerful than satisfaction itself, which is why diet can exert the sway of religion or political zealotry.”

And that can be addictive.

When she finally reaches her own weight loss, goal, for example, Pandora feels a sense of emptiness. She “wondered why people ever tried to accomplish anything when attainment of every sort was inbuilt with a forlorn Well, so-what’s next?”

More philosophically, she posits, there might be a more existential explanation. Perhaps, the eating/dieting paradigm has to do with emptiness. Take this idea, she says: “We are meant to be hungry.” We are meant to be hungry in order to strive, to have a goal.

For Shriver the question of obesity and our role in/relationship to it is particularly personal and relevant because her own older brother died of a weight problem in 2009; Shriver wrote about it publicly for various publications. This book, it would seem, is her way of trying to come to terms with it.

Stepping back, exploring and, in turn, philosophizing through protagonist Pandora about the role of family (are we literally our brother’s keeper?), whether we can or should sacrifice ourselves, how to best bring up children as whole, responsible people, allows Shriver a way to do that.

And probably helps her better understand her own broken heart along the way.

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